SHADOWS OF AFRICA <i> Text by Peter Matthiessen Illustrations by Mary Frank (Abrams: $34.95; 120 pp.) </i>

“At the Mara River (the hippos) had piled up in the rapids. . . . Their tuba voices spitting the wash of the Mara on its banks seemed like the uproar of the damned, as if, in the cold rain and purgatorial din, just at that moment, the great water pigs had been cast into perdition . . . “

So writes Peter Matthiessen, who has a wondrous, almost primordial sense of Africa; an author who can see “a silver-eyed giraffe, mute as a great flower”; “hyenas rising out of the raining grass like mud lumps given life”; “an Egyptian vulture gathering light in its wings.”

The lyrical passages in “Shadows of Africa” are from three previous books (plus some latter musing) but rather than scraps, Matthiessen has skimmed the cream of forays from Sudan to Botswana.

At his best, the author transcends the word; at her best, artist Mary Frank matches him stroke for stroke: quick, rough, true sketches like those of a cave dweller who studied with Picasso.

There is adventure here (Matthiessen is charged by a bull elephant, a feral buffalo, a hippo, even a Grevy’s zebra), lamentation (for disappearing fastnesses), a reflection of nature’s stern laws (not for the faint-hearted is a chapter in which wild dogs strip a zebra as cleanly as a master butcher).

Matthiessen can be cranky, when he finds no game where once there was a surfeit, but more often he can mesmerize:

On the elephant: “There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.”